Bar-Mitzvah mom

A few years ago, my son was asked by an acquaintance of mine what his religion was. He paused for a moment and then in his most serious and high pitched young boy voice he said matter-of-factly, “My dad is Jewish and my mom is a Vegetarian.”
The humorous irony to this statement is that I am Jewish too. Yet, at the time my son said this I was so staunchly devoted to my yoga practice, so invested in all the trimmings of what I thought defined me as a yogi (like hardcore vegetarianism) that he perceived me as belonging to a different faith altogether. Wearing all the spiritual emblems and trinkets was not nearly enough. Instead of keeping kosher, I kept vegan. Instead of acting on my tendencies toward mild hypochondria, I renounced antibiotics altogether. While my peers were renovating their kitchens and bathrooms I was replacing my four- poster bed with a mattress on the floor; and my refrigerator door was stamped with photos of my children and of my latest Indian gurus. ,At this time, it was the trappings of a yogic life that made me feel closer to being a yogi.
I was young in my yoga relationship. And if it was a new love in my life it resembled more a dynamic of a controlling lover boyfriend who was trying to turn me (literally twist me) into what it wanted me to be rather than giving me the space to realize and become comfortable with who I was at the time. Though it was an incredibly powerful time to have found yoga, I was willing to lose myself in the rapture of my new passion that I felt I had to become something else altogether.
No wonder my son was confused. I had so apparently adopted a whole different lifestyle, an “other” lifestyle, an identity stitched together by different rituals of other cultures. I had shrines next to my menorah. I had a mezuzah at my door and burned Nag Champa incense in my bedroom. Yoga was new to my life, and I was so captivated by my practice, so enraptured by the peace and energy it afforded my hectic life after I twisted and bound my body into the poses, that I wanted to decorate my life with everything I associated yoga with. It was only many years later when I realized that it wasn’t yoga who was the controlling lover boyfriend, it was me trying to renounce and change everything I was. It was the yoga that led me back to the very point of yoga: that engaging in my life, communing with its beautiful chaos, it’s richness and challenge and beauty gifted me the freedom to recognize who I really was, and thus, made me feel more affirmed, more comfortable to be myself – to be even greater than the self I knew.
So, many years later, this past December when I watched my son stand on a Bima holding a Torah about to become a Bar-Mitzvah, I was flooded with the deep sense of these connections. The most poignant moment for me was an intimate one. It was before the service actually began and the Rabbi and Charlie were taking photos together. The Rabbi took the Torah out of the arc and handed it to Charlie who held the scroll over his shoulder and posed for the picture. I watched my son hold the Torah and something in me stirred. I have always felt a closeness to my Jewish heritage, even when I had moments in my life where circumstances and life choices might have distanced me from my "Jewishness," there has always been a deep regard and sense of loving the faith with which I had grown up, the customs that often served as a gentle reminder of a people I belonged to in some regard. So watching Charlie stand there - a young man holding this emblematic book - touched something in me that spanned a long history, both a personal connection I felt toward my religion, but also an historical and ancient bind where I felt the beaming pride of mothers in every time looking to the value of this day.
How did I move from the radical yoga fundamentalist who refused to acknowledge the existence that another faith existed outside of a devoted asana practice to where I am now? How did I get get there? I guess the answer is simpler than it might appear. To be in any healthy relationship you have to be comfortable with who you are. At the beginning, I was restless and unsatisfied with who I was. I thought I needed to fix things about myself, adjust my life to complement this idea of yoga I had yet to understand. I thought I had to squeeze all the qualities and aspects that made up who I was into the confines of a myopic and stifling superficial yoga box. This would always be a struggle, until I recognized that at the core of it all, my yoga has lead me to develop a deep comfort in who I am as a person, and has gifted me the freedom to participate and relate to the world through the many kinds of relationships I have with and as myself be it a Jewish woman, a mother, a teacher, a friend, a daughter, a sister, a wife and a yogi.